Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to start the school day with an ‘emotions check-in.’ Abigail Shrier on the rise of ‘trauma-informed’ education.
I had the honor of narrating the audiobook for Irreversible Damage (for which I received hate mail from some who obviously hadn't even read the book!) and Ms. Shrier painstakingly references the sources of all her info. She sounds a long overdue clarion call for parents...WAKE UP and demand transparency from your schools and your state governments! We have gotten to the level of the ridiculous and we are harming an entire generation of kids!!!
And people ask me why I have homeschooled my kids for the last 12 years. They question my qualifications because I'm not a teacher. But my kids don't waste time in cry circles with their classmates. They get their work done, at their own pace, and then they explore NYC, going to the opera, playing in Central Park with their friends, playing sports at the JCC, going to the Met and other museums, etc. They spend their time making art and playing board games. And you know what? They feel pretty good. Because we water flowers, not weeds. (Love that metaphor, and I've used it with my kids for years.)
I've always viewed institutional schooling as a waste of childhood, but this latest development is next level.
This system is designed to cripple and paralyze critical thinking. All of us have an emotional journey and it’s called growing up. Introduce art as therapy or outdoor play.
I am a school psychologist and have witnessed this slippery slope where probing for trauma has hurt students and derailed the mission of our schools:to build skills (academic and behavioral) including the ability to self regulate behaviors in order to become an independent and self supporting adult. The trend of exclusion of parents from information about their child has created a deep mistrust of educational institutions, while burdening schools with an unmanageable and widening scope of responsibility. I know many highly skilled mental health providers in schools-licensed clinical social workers and school psychologists who work very hard in this ever changing landscape, to work with students to build very specific skills related to strengthening their healthy independence. Unfortunately schools are also filled with staff who fall under the umbrella of mental health “support” who, even with the best intentions , must justify their employment by interacting with the maximum number of students without any accountability for outcomes ( the goal being a student who goes about their day and is advancing in academic skills). The wheels have come off of schools and I am grateful for this exploration of some of the damage we do when our focus is to probe all students for trauma. I DO support school wide programs that incorporate simple skill building exercises to help students identify their attentional and energy states for learning, and then have simple strategies to shift from not-ready-to-learn to ready-to-learn while never leaving the classroom. Lowering the bar for achievement hurts, not helps all students and risks the future of our country.
School was once the great escape for the kids for whom home life was chaos. It provided routine and normalcy. Adults gave consistent and sane support by just being there to teach the academic subjects. Then the broken culture started to expect teachers be parents, nurses, healthcare workers, counselors, and more. Insanity entered the building in the form of activist DEI and SEL requirements. Don’t you know that now that most ‘school counselor offices’ are ‘safe spaces’ plastered with LGBTQ+ flags and DEI propaganda posters? Don’t you know the ‘adults’ in charge are soothing their own wounds enacting their dead dreams of relevancy by using SEL learning in the classroom? Don’t you know SEL is simply a mechanism to foster a culture of DEI in schools because empathy means that ‘no human is illegal’ and BLM and there is ‘No Place for Hate’ and ‘My Identity is…’ signing off as l sit in a public school classroom with my lunch as a sub in Seattle Public Schools. I love the students, l cannot stand the environment.
As a psychotherapist I believe in the value of therapy but have felt curious/concerned how therapy has impacted us culturally and how the hype and labeling and pathologizing plants a kind of learned helplessness and fragility confirmation bias. Our psyches and nervous systems are really miraculous amazing healing adapting features of our human self - not deficits. I am in awe of how resilient we are.
A corporate facilitator mom friend of mine confided in me last year "My daughter tells me she can't succeed in life because I gave her a time out. She saw on Instagram from a famous Doctor that time-outs traumatize kids so now she believes that her upper middle class life was traumatizing because I gave her a time out." I know this family to be clear, kind, firm parents.
To me community and belonging is missing and we fill in the gaps of lack of intimacy in some interesting ways. After 20 years of being a therapist, my "free range" teens have given me an earful on the therapy and political propaganda they are being fed every day and poke a lot of fun at it and me. I appreciate they have their own mind and I appreciate I listen openly.
In my effort to make sense of this therapy thing, I started putting my chair on the sidewalk out front of my office 9 years ago, not as therapist, but as person and over 9000 people have signed up to do the same around the world. I joke that I am trying to put myself out of business. Not really. I love my job. I mostly see couples these days. But therapy has turned into a cultural zeitgeist that I am not so sure about any more. I would rather pass better social policies that gave everyone the a sense of "safe enough" to be a human being rather than a human doing.
Here is an 11min doc on the my listening on the sidewalk out front of my therapy office project.
While I agree w many positions that abigail takes and share her disdain for ineffectual parenting, To paraphrase a popular yiddish aphorism ‘ anything extreme is no good’, Ms shrier speaks of spanking as if it is good /ok for a child to be shamed in order to learn. I fear that Too many parents who are emotionally unaware and immature will think they are doing the right thing by hitting and yelling at their kids.
Additionally, I think that by and large ( exceptions exist) it is a good skill for children to learn about their feelings and to connect to themselves with acceptance
The trouble today is the extent that many schools/ parents / some therapists fail to actively guide and direct kids with boundaries and skills, to become resilient , respectful, and responsible adults.
A story. These emotion circles were common in schools in the 70s. My wife, a school aide at the time, was surprised our daughter picked out a sad face. She later asked our daughter, you seemed happy at breakfast. Our daughter answered, if you pick the happy face you don't get to talk. We got her out of that school asap.
I don't know anyone who goes or has gone to a therapist/psychologist who is told they are perfectly healthy and mentally well. 'You don't need therapy', is a phrase you will never hear from this industry.
15 years ago I had to look my child's elementary principal in the eye and tell her that if she casually batted around the word "anxiety" one more time I would start to think about why she was trying to practice psychology without a license. She told me -- with all seriousness -- that it was easier to think about child behavior in terms of mental health than it was to introduce effective pedagogy.
I am writing from Canada where we have our very own brand of Government obscenity to deal with. In our case, we have an absolute plethora of boards, agencies, commissions etc. to protect the wee people from monopoly. Monopoly is very bad you know.
Yet our governments have built two monopolies right out in the open in education and health care. We pretend that they are not monopolies because constitutional authority is distributed among federal and provincial governments. Right! But they all sing from the same song sheet.
Our ancestors knew better than this. Our political systems are different but they both share an explicit objective - distributed power. I mention this as a preamble to the following axiom: There are idiots! First corollary: these idiots will seek positions from which they can work the most mischief.
This problem seems insurmountable because for both nations it is national in scope. Both nations need to restore their respective constitutional norms. Then we citizens can cut these problems down to size and address them. Resisting the claim that a credentialled lout carrying a title somehow knows better is a pretty good start.
My parents were alcoholics and I would rather die than talk about this in my school classroom. Many students had “skeletons” in their closets and didn’t want to tell the world about them. School was a place to be with friends and learn about the world. Good educators focused on encouraging intellectual curiosity and learning in their students. That was why the students were in school not for introspective analysis. The “secrets” were kept locked away and only shared with best friends if at all. To most they were a source of embarrassment , shame and anger. It was nobody’s business I felt. As an adult I learned about the multitude of problems children face and as (or if) we matured, and how to deal with them. Life is a continuous process of education for all people not fixated on narcissistic self pity. Learning about the world and its people is truly liberating. Perhaps the therapeutic circus taking place in American schools would end if they were no longer able to get taxpayer funds through Medicaide. Just reading, writing and arithmetic. Amen.
They're all social contagions: depression, anxiety, gender dysphoria, suicide. As with conversion disorders, the symptoms and expression of these maladies are very real. They're just generated from within rather than from without. I work in a middle school and high school, and I'm seeing it all.
Feeling sad sometimes, lonely, depressed, happy even; these were formerly regarded simply as aspects of being human. This is where great literature, drama, and poetry come from: our shared humanity and the emotions attendant upon that humanity. Feel the catharsis: the pain, followed by the relief, the rebirth.
But now everything must be fixed, and right now, either with therapy, medication, perhaps a primal scream or two. Somehow we've arrived at a belief that we should never have to experience a negative emotion.
Religion used to be helpful, the idea of a higher power, work, meaning, and purpose found outside the self. But religion and a mission to help others were forfeited in favor of this focus on The Self. Social media is the new church, with all its petty gods, its "influencers," its rituals, its liturgy, its communion.
Get over yourself. Do something for someone else. Put down the phone. Take a walk. Smile. Sing a song. Write a letter to someone. Go to church. Learn a new language. Paint a room. Plant a tree. Lift a weight. Hold a door open for somebody. Play a musical instrument. Rescue a pet. Memorize a great poem. Make something with your hands. Sign up as a volunteer.
Bravo! I couldn’t agree with the points raised in this article more. Most school counsellors have taken a few courses or a post Bach degree in counselling, after getting their initial teaching degree. Therefore, they are woefully ill equipped to support students who have true emotional needs. Teachers are even less equipped to deal with students with significant social emotional needs in the classroom setting. Their role as a teacher, who supports students to learn important skills like reading and math, is where their job should begin and end. It is too easy and convenient for educators to focus on other areas, like social emotional learning, as the performance in this area cannot be measured. The reality is, as Ms. Shrier argues, that by focussing on social emotional issues rather than on student learning, teachers may actually be doing more harm than good. We should all be asking ourselves why reading and math scores have tanked in many school districts and why there is not more attention paid to this important issue.
I posted two articles (https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/282881 and https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/297636 on Abigail's first book on Israelnationalnews.com's English site where I am op-ed editor and book reviewer. I would like to review this one, which seems necessary reading for parents. I could not find it at Israeli bookstores. Amazon takes forever and charges a fortune for shipping. Any help?
I had the honor of narrating the audiobook for Irreversible Damage (for which I received hate mail from some who obviously hadn't even read the book!) and Ms. Shrier painstakingly references the sources of all her info. She sounds a long overdue clarion call for parents...WAKE UP and demand transparency from your schools and your state governments! We have gotten to the level of the ridiculous and we are harming an entire generation of kids!!!
And people ask me why I have homeschooled my kids for the last 12 years. They question my qualifications because I'm not a teacher. But my kids don't waste time in cry circles with their classmates. They get their work done, at their own pace, and then they explore NYC, going to the opera, playing in Central Park with their friends, playing sports at the JCC, going to the Met and other museums, etc. They spend their time making art and playing board games. And you know what? They feel pretty good. Because we water flowers, not weeds. (Love that metaphor, and I've used it with my kids for years.)
I've always viewed institutional schooling as a waste of childhood, but this latest development is next level.
This system is designed to cripple and paralyze critical thinking. All of us have an emotional journey and it’s called growing up. Introduce art as therapy or outdoor play.
I am a school psychologist and have witnessed this slippery slope where probing for trauma has hurt students and derailed the mission of our schools:to build skills (academic and behavioral) including the ability to self regulate behaviors in order to become an independent and self supporting adult. The trend of exclusion of parents from information about their child has created a deep mistrust of educational institutions, while burdening schools with an unmanageable and widening scope of responsibility. I know many highly skilled mental health providers in schools-licensed clinical social workers and school psychologists who work very hard in this ever changing landscape, to work with students to build very specific skills related to strengthening their healthy independence. Unfortunately schools are also filled with staff who fall under the umbrella of mental health “support” who, even with the best intentions , must justify their employment by interacting with the maximum number of students without any accountability for outcomes ( the goal being a student who goes about their day and is advancing in academic skills). The wheels have come off of schools and I am grateful for this exploration of some of the damage we do when our focus is to probe all students for trauma. I DO support school wide programs that incorporate simple skill building exercises to help students identify their attentional and energy states for learning, and then have simple strategies to shift from not-ready-to-learn to ready-to-learn while never leaving the classroom. Lowering the bar for achievement hurts, not helps all students and risks the future of our country.
School was once the great escape for the kids for whom home life was chaos. It provided routine and normalcy. Adults gave consistent and sane support by just being there to teach the academic subjects. Then the broken culture started to expect teachers be parents, nurses, healthcare workers, counselors, and more. Insanity entered the building in the form of activist DEI and SEL requirements. Don’t you know that now that most ‘school counselor offices’ are ‘safe spaces’ plastered with LGBTQ+ flags and DEI propaganda posters? Don’t you know the ‘adults’ in charge are soothing their own wounds enacting their dead dreams of relevancy by using SEL learning in the classroom? Don’t you know SEL is simply a mechanism to foster a culture of DEI in schools because empathy means that ‘no human is illegal’ and BLM and there is ‘No Place for Hate’ and ‘My Identity is…’ signing off as l sit in a public school classroom with my lunch as a sub in Seattle Public Schools. I love the students, l cannot stand the environment.
As a psychotherapist I believe in the value of therapy but have felt curious/concerned how therapy has impacted us culturally and how the hype and labeling and pathologizing plants a kind of learned helplessness and fragility confirmation bias. Our psyches and nervous systems are really miraculous amazing healing adapting features of our human self - not deficits. I am in awe of how resilient we are.
A corporate facilitator mom friend of mine confided in me last year "My daughter tells me she can't succeed in life because I gave her a time out. She saw on Instagram from a famous Doctor that time-outs traumatize kids so now she believes that her upper middle class life was traumatizing because I gave her a time out." I know this family to be clear, kind, firm parents.
To me community and belonging is missing and we fill in the gaps of lack of intimacy in some interesting ways. After 20 years of being a therapist, my "free range" teens have given me an earful on the therapy and political propaganda they are being fed every day and poke a lot of fun at it and me. I appreciate they have their own mind and I appreciate I listen openly.
In my effort to make sense of this therapy thing, I started putting my chair on the sidewalk out front of my office 9 years ago, not as therapist, but as person and over 9000 people have signed up to do the same around the world. I joke that I am trying to put myself out of business. Not really. I love my job. I mostly see couples these days. But therapy has turned into a cultural zeitgeist that I am not so sure about any more. I would rather pass better social policies that gave everyone the a sense of "safe enough" to be a human being rather than a human doing.
Here is an 11min doc on the my listening on the sidewalk out front of my therapy office project.
https://vimeo.com/568929533
Or the website
Www.sidewalk-talk.org
While I agree w many positions that abigail takes and share her disdain for ineffectual parenting, To paraphrase a popular yiddish aphorism ‘ anything extreme is no good’, Ms shrier speaks of spanking as if it is good /ok for a child to be shamed in order to learn. I fear that Too many parents who are emotionally unaware and immature will think they are doing the right thing by hitting and yelling at their kids.
Additionally, I think that by and large ( exceptions exist) it is a good skill for children to learn about their feelings and to connect to themselves with acceptance
The trouble today is the extent that many schools/ parents / some therapists fail to actively guide and direct kids with boundaries and skills, to become resilient , respectful, and responsible adults.
And “bad therapy” makes the case well!
A story. These emotion circles were common in schools in the 70s. My wife, a school aide at the time, was surprised our daughter picked out a sad face. She later asked our daughter, you seemed happy at breakfast. Our daughter answered, if you pick the happy face you don't get to talk. We got her out of that school asap.
I don't know anyone who goes or has gone to a therapist/psychologist who is told they are perfectly healthy and mentally well. 'You don't need therapy', is a phrase you will never hear from this industry.
15 years ago I had to look my child's elementary principal in the eye and tell her that if she casually batted around the word "anxiety" one more time I would start to think about why she was trying to practice psychology without a license. She told me -- with all seriousness -- that it was easier to think about child behavior in terms of mental health than it was to introduce effective pedagogy.
For a long time I’ve wanted to print a bumper sticker: “Your feelings are real, but they don’t often represent reality.”
Those implementing the misguided focus on SEL need to wrestle with that idea.
I am writing from Canada where we have our very own brand of Government obscenity to deal with. In our case, we have an absolute plethora of boards, agencies, commissions etc. to protect the wee people from monopoly. Monopoly is very bad you know.
Yet our governments have built two monopolies right out in the open in education and health care. We pretend that they are not monopolies because constitutional authority is distributed among federal and provincial governments. Right! But they all sing from the same song sheet.
Our ancestors knew better than this. Our political systems are different but they both share an explicit objective - distributed power. I mention this as a preamble to the following axiom: There are idiots! First corollary: these idiots will seek positions from which they can work the most mischief.
This problem seems insurmountable because for both nations it is national in scope. Both nations need to restore their respective constitutional norms. Then we citizens can cut these problems down to size and address them. Resisting the claim that a credentialled lout carrying a title somehow knows better is a pretty good start.
My parents were alcoholics and I would rather die than talk about this in my school classroom. Many students had “skeletons” in their closets and didn’t want to tell the world about them. School was a place to be with friends and learn about the world. Good educators focused on encouraging intellectual curiosity and learning in their students. That was why the students were in school not for introspective analysis. The “secrets” were kept locked away and only shared with best friends if at all. To most they were a source of embarrassment , shame and anger. It was nobody’s business I felt. As an adult I learned about the multitude of problems children face and as (or if) we matured, and how to deal with them. Life is a continuous process of education for all people not fixated on narcissistic self pity. Learning about the world and its people is truly liberating. Perhaps the therapeutic circus taking place in American schools would end if they were no longer able to get taxpayer funds through Medicaide. Just reading, writing and arithmetic. Amen.
They're all social contagions: depression, anxiety, gender dysphoria, suicide. As with conversion disorders, the symptoms and expression of these maladies are very real. They're just generated from within rather than from without. I work in a middle school and high school, and I'm seeing it all.
Feeling sad sometimes, lonely, depressed, happy even; these were formerly regarded simply as aspects of being human. This is where great literature, drama, and poetry come from: our shared humanity and the emotions attendant upon that humanity. Feel the catharsis: the pain, followed by the relief, the rebirth.
But now everything must be fixed, and right now, either with therapy, medication, perhaps a primal scream or two. Somehow we've arrived at a belief that we should never have to experience a negative emotion.
Religion used to be helpful, the idea of a higher power, work, meaning, and purpose found outside the self. But religion and a mission to help others were forfeited in favor of this focus on The Self. Social media is the new church, with all its petty gods, its "influencers," its rituals, its liturgy, its communion.
Get over yourself. Do something for someone else. Put down the phone. Take a walk. Smile. Sing a song. Write a letter to someone. Go to church. Learn a new language. Paint a room. Plant a tree. Lift a weight. Hold a door open for somebody. Play a musical instrument. Rescue a pet. Memorize a great poem. Make something with your hands. Sign up as a volunteer.
You're not that special.
But maybe you could be.
LOVE this!!
Bravo! I couldn’t agree with the points raised in this article more. Most school counsellors have taken a few courses or a post Bach degree in counselling, after getting their initial teaching degree. Therefore, they are woefully ill equipped to support students who have true emotional needs. Teachers are even less equipped to deal with students with significant social emotional needs in the classroom setting. Their role as a teacher, who supports students to learn important skills like reading and math, is where their job should begin and end. It is too easy and convenient for educators to focus on other areas, like social emotional learning, as the performance in this area cannot be measured. The reality is, as Ms. Shrier argues, that by focussing on social emotional issues rather than on student learning, teachers may actually be doing more harm than good. We should all be asking ourselves why reading and math scores have tanked in many school districts and why there is not more attention paid to this important issue.